Session Descriptions

Opening Keynote: Nicole Allen

Nicole Allen is the Director of Open Education for SPARC. In this role she leads SPARC’s work to advance openness in education, which includes a robust state and federal policy program, a broad librarian community of practice, and a leadership program for OER librarians.

Nicole was inspired by the idea of open education as an undergraduate student, and has dedicated her twelve-year career to advancing the vision of a world where everyone, everywhere has access to knowledge. Now an internationally-recognized advocate and leading voice in the movement for open education, she has been widely cited in the media and has given hundreds of talks and trainings in more than a dozen countries.

Nicole’s career began in 2006 at the Student Public Interest Research Groups, where she worked with students across the United States to organize grassroots campaigns on higher education affordability and related issues. She organized more than 3,000 professors to sign a statement endorsing the idea of open educational resources and led a cross-country van tour that mobilized more than 10,000 students in support of open textbooks. She also helped pass state and federal legislation to reform anti-consumer practices by the textbook publishing industry, and authored two seminal reports on digital textbooks and the impact of costs on students. Alongside her issue-focused work, she also led non-partisan voter registration and mobilization efforts during the 2006, 2008, and 2012 elections.

Nicole joined SPARC in 2013 to develop and launch a program on open education. Under her leadership, SPARC’s open education program has been a driving force behind numerous state and federal policy achievements, including securing Congressional funding for an open education grant program and establishing a U.S. Department of Education policy requiring open licensing for grant-funded materials. Nicole also oversaw the launch of SPARC’s Open Education Leadership Program, a first-of-its-kind professional development program that is positioned to become the industry standard in the growing field of open education librarianship. She also continues to work with students through the Right to Research Coalition, and as part of the organizing team for OpenCon.

Nicole graduated from the University of Puget Sound in 2006 with a Bachelors of Arts in Philosophy. She is almost always on the go, but is most frequently found between her home in Providence, RI and SPARC’s Washington, DC headquarters.

Session A: 11:10-12:00

OER & Textbook Affordability in Your Small Academic Library

As the cost of textbooks continues to rise, faculty are becoming more interested in alternative course texts for their classes. This provides libraries with an opportunity to work more closely with faculty to provide alternative texts including open educational resources (OER), but it also presents some challenges—particularly in smaller academic libraries. In this session we will provide models for OER and textbook affordability programs at community colleges and independent colleges. We will discuss how to start and sustain a textbook affordability and OER initiative on a small campus, and facilitate activities for attendees to brainstorm and plan their own initiatives. We will also discuss ways NC LIVE’s Open Education North Carolina initiative can help you and your faculty. Get your questions answered and discuss how you can get faculty and other stakeholders on your campus involved in textbook affordability!

Teaching with Films on Demand: Using Curated Video Content to Inspire the Future

Presentation, AlexanderJulie Raynor, High Point Public Library

In the public library we are faced with information requests from educators serving various segments of the population. This presentation will describe an effort to meet specific informational needs for educators in traditional and Homeschool settings using the archival and documentary videos available from NC Live’s Films on Demand collection. The session will include strategies for performing subject specific searches in the improved FOD platform (including searches based on NC DPI Standards and Common Core curricula), as well as instruction on creating playlists for current topics for a general audience.

In light of an Office for Civil Rights complaint about the accessibility of UNC’s websites including part of the library site, we began using automated checkers like WebAIM’s WAVE to assess and fix issues. However, these tools don’t detect everything that helps make a webpage or tool easy to use or replace the experiences of actual users trying to meet their information needs for class assignments and more. Because of this, we decided to perform a usability test of the University Libraries’ database access page with users who are low vision or blind. We adapted our protocol for running a usability test to ensure our methods were inclusive for our targeted user group. We will walk attendees through the process of auditing a website using freely available tools then discuss our process for testing with users and our findings.

Learn how librarians form partnerships with local and state organizations to support lifelong learning outdoors. Becky Schneider will discuss how her library supports gardening and gardeners through classes, a seed exchange, and a teaching garden. The library is able to do this work through partnerships with the Cooperative Extension, Soil & Water Conservation District, and area farms, businesses, and nonprofits. Jonathan Marchal will discuss the N.C. Arboretum's ecoEXPLORE initiative, and how it is being used to support lifelong learning outside everywhere from Madison County Public Libraries - Library Journal's 2018 Best Small Library in America -- to the Greensboro Public Library. This panel will be facilitated by Noah Lenstra of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Open, Inclusive Practice and Diversity Residencies

Peer-guided Roundtable, ClaxtonDeborah Yun Caldwell, UNC-Greensboro

Librarianship is a largely white profession, and libraries often struggle with attracting and retaining candidates of color. Library diversity residencies are one answer to this longstanding problem. Diversity residencies aim to support recent graduates of color in librarianship through extended mentorship and guidance in their first post-MLS job. Learn about strategies academic libraries use to support residents of color, considerations for starting a residency of your own, and how these methods can be applied throughout the field of librarianship outside of academic libraries.

NC LIVE Summon Users' Group

Users' Group, Dogwood

Does your library use Summon? Are you in the middle of Summon implementation or interested in signing up? If the answer is "yes" to any of these questions, then come to the NC LIVE Summon User's Group Meeting! We'll discuss issues, concerns, feedback and tips from your fellow NC LIVE Summon libraries. We'll be joined by Jill Postlewait, Ex Libris North America Team Lead for Customer Success, who will be available to answer your questions and give a product update on the latest Summon features.

Session B: 1:15-2:05

OER 2.0- What’s Next?

So you’ve been advocating for open educational resources (OER) on your campus--now what? OER has been a growing movement for several years and librarians across North Carolina have begun supporting faculty OER adoption. How can you grow your campus’s OER program? How can we broaden our reach across our state and beyond? Come hear librarians from UNC-Greensboro, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State University share examples of how to expand and extend an OER program to support student success, use open pedagogy to transform teaching and learning, and connect with the broader community. Then share your own stories in an open discussion about what OER can do for your students, faculty, and campus as a whole. Join the conversation to explore what’s next for your program and help us push this movement forward!

Many older adults have been left behind on the wrong side of the digital divide. This population is often underserved because they may move at a slower pace and lack the skills that would enable them to join a class filled with younger, more tech-savvy participants. Cumberland County Public Library’s Senior Geek Squad, in partnership with the Cliffdale Recreation Center, meets seniors where they are and helps them to bridge the digital divide. It operates on the P.A.C.E. model:

Patience- You need to be willing to go the distance.Acknowledgement- Recognize what their needs are and address them.Compassion-Understand what may come easy for you may not for them.Energy- Stay positive and driven because it takes time.

This session will provide tips and examples for teaching seniors technology including classroom setups, handouts, and, most importantly, a lesson plan that will work. From sending emails to adding a new contact on their smartphone, they are still eager to learn, just at a different PACE.

Library Partnerships to Improve Healthcare

This session provides success stories about 21 st century library-health service partnerships, programs, and cases. Proposals for new and challenging activities will be introduced, and NC libraries will be invited to participate. Dr. Noah Lenstra, UNC-Greensboro, will describe research and national library programs and tools. Research shows that libraries are reducing gaps in health understanding. Examples include everything from providing Xbox Bowling Leagues for Seniors to teaching teenagers about fitness apps. From NC Central University, Mr. Gregory Clinton, School of Law, and Dr. Deborah Swain, School of Library and Information Sciences, will introduce partnership proposals and Virtual Justice Project broadcasts information.

Using NC LIVE Content to Add “Research to the Job Search”: Working with Students to Find Companies and Opportunities through Smart Business Searching

Presentation, Room 7David Bryden, High Point University

In this changing academic environment, it takes a village to ensure student success. At High Point University our librarians have built a unique relationship with our Career and Professional Development Office and our Academic Business Department. Through relationship building, the library staff have played an important role as students begin job and internship searches. This role has culminated in a series of workshops sponsored by these three organizations in which we teach students methods to locate an industry group and then focus on companies and their personnel to make this research not about finding a job but about finding a meaningful career.

The Ins and Outs of Summon: Implementation and Configuration Implications for Your Library

The Summon Discovery Service is now available for all NC LIVE libraries, and many of us have already implemented it! Are you one of the early adopters? Come discuss your Summon implementation, share your configuration ideas, tell us what your library staff and users think about it, and get advice from others. Are you unsure if Summon is right for your library? Find out what is really involved, and what options you have, before you make this decision for your library.

Session 3: 1:50-2:30

Strategy, Libraries, and the Fat Smoker

Strategic planning. Have two more innocuous words ever met, fallen in love, and through their unnatural union caused us more grief? Do you dread retreating to offsite locations with your Board members and a “professional facilitator” to ponder your purpose, future, and fundamental value in the universe? Do you end up pondering what offense you possibly could have committed to deserve trust falls with Larry?

Good news: You don’t have to live like this. Most strategic planning is a waste of time. Strategy, on the other hand, is incredibly important and intellectually straightforward. In fact, you could probably choose a perfectly good strategy in a matter of minutes. The challenge isn’t to think of a good strategy, but to embody it in our everyday actions. Much like losing weight or shedding a bad habit in our personal lives, we know what, how, and why to do what is necessary to achieve our goal. What we too often lack is the discipline and commitment to change our behaviors, now and forever, in ways that support the achievement of that goal.

So it is in our organizational lives. We can rattle off our goals by memory. What prevents us from achieving them is a lack of discipline and commitment to change our organizational behaviors, now and forever, in ways that support the achievement of our goals.

Using David Maister’s Strategy and the Fat Smoker as a guide, Greg Raschke and Rob Ross will apply this management book’s principles to libraries, highlighting how to weave strategy into the fabric of your organization to support the achievement of your goals.

Open Educational Resources in the Library

Presentation, Room 4Rachel Statham, Lenoir-Rhyne University

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are already a trend in higher education, but what sort of impact do they have on the typical librarian’s role? In this session, we will learn about OERs, the Creative Commons License, and how these free resources are collected and shared. These resources are freely available, but that does not mean that they are widely shared or evaluated. With our research and information literacy expertise, librarians can make quality OERs more accessible to a variety of populations in need.

If I Can Do It Anyone Can – Creating a Library Podcast

It is not as formidable a challenge as it seems-you too can create a library podcast. The entry costs are low and the learning curve exists but is by no means insurmountable. The presenter has been creating a library podcast for 3 years now, with 16 now under his belt. These include interviews with library staff, faculty, and college administrators. Sometimes the biggest challenge is getting persons to feature on the podcast! Tips on getting guests for your show will be part of the discussion.

A podcast is a low-cost marketing endeavor by your library. Ideas for programming will be shared and the presenter will share his mistakes implementing the Voices of GTCC podcast. Staff requirements are minimal. You are only limited by the resources at your disposal-go as big as your situation allows. Come learn how you can hit the Internet airwaves with your library podcast!

Meeting them Where They Are: Bringing Online Resources into the Classrooms

Two teen librarians discuss the challenges and successes of using outreach to bring library resources outside of the library and into the schools. We will go over three successful outreach programs that have both promoted NC LIVE products in the classroom and brought students into the library, as well as connecting with teachers and media center specialists before the school year. Outreach programs include the Githens Middle School Field Trip, Durham School of the Arts Booklist Project, and a longstanding Makerspace program at City of Medicine Academy. The presentation will provide handouts describing the outreach programs (including budgets) so attendees can implement similar programs in their schools.

Integrating the Information Literacy Framework: Perspectives from the Field

Peer-Guided Roundtable, Room 7Stephanie Crowe, UNC-Wilmington

At this roundtable session, participants will discuss techniques for and experiences with integrating ACRL's Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education into the curriculum. The session facilitator will briefly describe a program she developed at her institution, called the Information Literacy Faculty Fellows program, in which librarians and teaching faculty worked together to learn about the Framework and brainstorm ways to apply it to teaching and learning. The bulk of the session will consist of a discussion in which participants will share ideas, accomplishments and failures, potential issues, lessons learned, and future plans for application of the Framework at their institutions. This session is suitable for librarians who are already integrating the Framework as well as for those who are interested in getting started.

Session 4: 3:00-3:40

Teaching News Literacy

Are you worried about the spread of misinformation? Want to learn how to teach patrons to evaluate what they see before spreading false information? Stephanie Brown has taught multiple news literacy sessions for high school teachers, senior citizens, academic librarians and wants to share what she’s learned.

This presentation will address three key elements to overcoming the spread of misinformation: teaching news literacy; finding credible news sources; and learning how news gets made. Stephanie will demonstrate techniques to teach news literacy with hands-on, politically neutral activities and will show how to fact-check stories using NC LIVE news resources and Google. We will discuss teaching strategies for sharing that knowledge with others in a way that is respectful as well as suggestions for additional training about how news gets made.

Help Your Patrons Succeed with NC LIVE’s Career and Test Prep Resources

Hands-On Training, Room 4Caroline Hallam, NC LIVE

Want to help your community members reach their educational and career goals? Join your NC LIVE Instruction Librarian for an overview and hands-on session with NC LIVE’s career and test preparation resources! Together we will explore Testing & Education Reference Center, Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center, and Cypress Resume. You’ll learn about the content of these resources, how to navigate them, and discuss ideas for using them in your communities. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and your questions!

The Power of Story and Poetry Therapy When Working with Refugees, Cancer Patients, and Children with Behavioral Issues

Presentation, Room 6Irania Patterson, Charlotte Mecklenburg

This session focuses on the fears, challenges, threats, barriers and opportunities librarians face when delivering outreach programs in nontraditional settings. It will provide with effective strategies and skills to use when facilitating programs for marginalized populations.During this session we will emphasize the evocative value of poetry therapy and literature to foster identification, sense of belonging, connection, and personal transformation. Librarians will also learn strategies on how they can motivate their audience to write their response to published literature drawing on their own experiences and emotions.

We Have Access to WHAT?!: How Public Librarians Can Get Into Schools and Educate Media Coordinators on NC LIVE Resources

Presentation, Room 7Joel Ferdon, Davie County Public Library

This presentation will focus on how to reach out to and educate local media coordinators on the eResources that are available to them through their public library. Because public libraries have access to eResources that are beneficial to students that school libraries do not necessarily have, such as Mango Languages, Gale Testing & Education Reference Center, and Films on Demand, it is crucial to form partnerships with those school librarians so that their students can benefit from knowing how to use them. This will create a cyclical relationship between the public library and the schools with the end benefit being greater use of the resources and greater success in the community. The presentation will also focus heavily on how to find opportunities to go out into the community to educate the media coordinators such as literacy nights, staff training days, and media coordinator professional developments.

Behind the Bookshelf: The Hidden Lives of Vendor Librarians

The relationship between a library and a vendor should be a partnership, with the library able to communicate what they and their community need and the vendor working on services that meet those needs. NoveList strives to fulfill that idea, but we are always trying to do better. As part of this roundtable, two NoveList librarians lead a discussion about the state of readers’ advisory services in North Carolina, what libraries needs are both from their vendors and from their staff and communities, and ways to better work as partners.

Librarians work for many, if not all, of the library vendors, but most library science students don’t consider this option after their course of study ends. The relationship between a library and a vendor should be a partnership, with open dialog about what library communities need and how vendors can provide services to meet those needs. Two librarians who have chosen to work at NoveList will lead a collaborative and creative discussion about the ways that North Carolina librarians can move readers’ advisory forward, and what NoveList can do to help. This will be a hands-on discussion and exploration of ideas NoveList is considering for the future.

Presenter Bios

Luke Aeschleman is a Digital Technologies Development Librarian at NCSU Libraries. As a DTDL, he provides technical leadership and hands-on programming expertise for a portfolio of digital library projects in the Digital Library Initiatives (DLI) department.

Beth Bernhart is the Assistant Dean for Collection Management and Scholarly Communications for the University Libraries at UNCG. She was previously Electronic Resources Librarian at UNCG, and has consulted with a number of other libraries and organizations. Prior to coming to UNCG in 2000, she was Associate Director of Library Services at Greensboro College. She is the main conference director for the Charleston Library Conference, and co-editor of the Charleston Conference Proceedings series.

Terry Brandsma is the Information Technology Librarian at the University Libraries, UNC Greensboro. His work in public, special, and academic libraries has concentrated on emerging technologies, usability, library systems, and discovery platforms.

David Bryden is the Director of Library Services at High Point University and has been at HPU since 1991. He is the liaison to the Business and the Health Sciences departments. One of his primary interest are in methods to partner the library with other academic departments. He also teaches as an adjunct in the library school at UNC Greensboro.

Keith Burkhead is a Reference Librarian and has been at Guilford Technical Community College since 1996. He's responsible for the delivery of library services at the GTCC Greensboro Campus. Keith received his BAS from Samford University, has a Master of Divinity from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and an MLS from NC Central.

Marcie Burton is the Electronic Resources Cataloging Technician at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She works with Collection Manager/Knowledge Base and the Institutional Repository. Also, she assists the Information Technology Librarian with analytics, Summon implementation, troubleshooting, and special projects.

Victoria Caplinger leads the team of librarians in NoveList’s Book Discovery department, which creates readers’ advisory content in many forms. After serving on various literary book award committees, she is now diving back into genre reading -- she particularly enjoys horror, science fiction, and dark psychological studies of people behaving badly.

Gregory W. Clinton, Sr. is Director of Information Technology and Facilities in the NC Central University School of Law. He received a BA in Business Administration from Morehouse College. He directs the Virtual Legal Education or “Virtual Justice Project” (VJP), an innovative combination of legal education and technology.

Will Cross is the Director of the Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center in the NCSU Libraries and an instructor in the UNC SILS. Trained as a lawyer and librarian, he guides policy, speaks, and writes on open culture and navigating legal uncertainty.

Stephanie Crowe is the Social Sciences and History Librarian at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her main responsibilities include instruction, reference, collection management, and outreach for the departments of Anthropology, History, International Studies, Psychology, Public and International Affairs, and Sociology/Criminology. In Spring 2018, she spearheaded a pilot program to begin to integrate the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education into UNCW’s undergraduate curriculum.

Joel Ferdon is the Reference Librarian at the Davie County Public Library. He serves as the Chair of the Marketing Committee for NCLA, and he will be a mentor for the Leadership Institute this next biennium. When Joel is not zipping around the library fixing things, you can find him spending time with his wife, son, and their two black labs out in the garden.

As the Instruction Librarian at NC LIVE, Caroline Hallam trains library professionals to help them make the most of their NC LIVE resources. Before joining NC LIVE in 2016, Caroline was the Instruction and Electronic Services Librarian at Central Carolina Community College. She earned her MSLS from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Kate Hill is the Electronic Resources Librarian at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In this role, she acts as the knowledge base manager for the library's discovery system, and has been helping lead, along with the Information Technology Librarian, the implementation of Summon. She manages all aspects of electronic resources, from acquisitions to preservation.

Dr. Noah Lenstra is Assistant Professor of Library and Information Studies at UNC-Greensboro. He completed his PhD at the University of Illinois in 2016. He is on the Advisory Board for the Public Library Association’s Initiative to Advance Health Literacy and Consumer Health Information in Public Libraries (funded by NLM).

Meryle A. Leonard is the Outreach Manager for Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, coordinating the design, development and evaluation of a centralized delivery of outreach services for the twenty-branch system. Meryle contributed in two ALA books, Librarians as Community Partners: An Outreach Handbook and Library Services for Multicultural Patrons.

Jennifer Lohmann is a NoveList Consultant, which means she gets to talk with librarians from around the world about projects they’re working on and brainstorm ways NoveList can help them. When she’s not working, she cooks, ignores her running shoes, and writes romance novels.

Samantha O'Connor is the Public Services Librarian at Central Carolina Community College. In this role she manages archival activities for the college, provides interlibrary loan services, and coordinates the scheduling and development of the seated instruction program. She also collaborates with colleagues to develop and implement the growing online embedded librarian instructional program, and works with faculty to develop fully integrated, student centered information literacy modules for a wide variety of online classes. Prior to coming to Central Carolina, she was the librarian for the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, MA. She received her MLIS from Dominican University in 2009.

Irania Patterson is a dynamic speaker, author and educator who specialize in the subjects of arts integration in multicultural- bilingual populations, and the connections with literacy and mental health in library programs. For the past 20 years she has worked as an outreach program specialist for the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. Currently she is aiming for her certification as a Registered Biblio-Poetry Therapist Facilitator.

Caroline Peterson is the chair of teen services at the Durham County Library, and she has been the teen librarian at the Southwest branch since 2014. Library experience encompasses large event planning for Summer Reading Kickoff, Durham Comics Fest, and Teen Literature Festival, outreach with schools & community organizations, as well as making detailed bibliographies on YA sub genres such as LGBTQIA fiction, #MeToo, and 20th Century Fiction.

Desiree Peterson is the Teen Librarian at the North Regional branch of the Durham County Library. She has been with Durham County Library since 2013 and loves every minute spent working with kids and teens. She loves playing with new tech, YA literature, running the peer tutoring program, and working with media center specialists to bring programs into their spaces and teens into hers.

Greg Raschke is the Interim Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at NCSU.

Christopher Robinson is an Information Services Librarian at Cumberland County Public Library in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Christopher has an affinity for technology and enjoys teaching and sharing his knowledge with others. He obtained his MLIS from UNC--Greensboro and B.S. degrees in Marketing & Business from Methodist University. Christopher is an ALA Spectrum Scholar.

Rob Ross is the Executive Director at NC LIVE.

Jennifer Sackett worked in academic libraries for almost twenty years before accepting the position as Director of the Lincoln County Public Library in 2009. She is currently President of the North Carolina Public Library Directors Association and serves on the Resource Advisory Committee (RAC) for NC LIVE. Jennifer has been a strong advocate for library funding in North Carolina and the development of NC Kids Digital Library.

Dr. Katherine Skinner is the Executive Director of the Educopia Institute, a not-for-profit educational organization that builds networks and collaborative communities to help cultural, scientific, and scholarly institutions achieve greater impact. She is the founding program director for the MetaArchive Cooperative, a community-owned and community-governed digital preservation network founded in 2004 that now has more than 50 member institutions in four countries. She has also played a founding role in the Library Publishing Coalition, a membership organization that now supports library publishing and scholarly communications activities across more than 50 academic libraries; and the BitCurator Consortium, a community-led membership association that supports digital forensics practices in libraries, archives, and museums, and that provides administrative, user, and community support for the BitCurator environment and open-source tools.

Skinner received her Ph.D. from Emory University. She has co-edited three books and has authored and co-authored numerous reports and articles. She is currently Principal Investigator for research projects on continuing education (Nexus, Mapping the Landscapes), digital preservation (ETD plus, Chronicles in Preservation), and scholarly communication (Chrysalis). She regularly teaches graduate courses and workshops in digital librarianship and preservation topics, and provides consultation services to groups that are planning or implementing digital scholarship and digital preservation programs.

Since receiving her MSLIS from Simmons College in 2013, Rachel Statham has worked in both academic and public libraries. She started her career at Springfield Technical Community College (Springfield, Massachusetts) as a reference librarian and adjunct faculty member, and later implemented a campus-wide OER Initiative. She is currently the librarian at Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Center for Graduate Studies of Asheville.

Dr. Deborah Swain is Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Sciences at NC Central University. She has experience in corporations such as IBM, AT&T, and Bell Labs. In 1999, she received her PhD at UNC-Hill. She teaches graduate courses in health informatics, expert systems and usability.

Daniel Whitehead has always loved to tinker with technology, so his position as NC LIVE’s Web and Database Development Librarian suits him well. His work encompasses all things digital at NC LIVE: building and updating the website, ensuring access to resources, managing EZproxy, and generally providing a bit of technical know-how, helping to make everything run as smoothly as possible.

Stephanie Willen Brown connects people with the information they need when they need it. She offers research assistance to students in her role as Park Library director at the UNC’s School of Media & Journalism in Chapel Hill. She is passionate about teaching patrons and teachers to identify credible online sources.

Joselyn Williams, a Library Associate, enjoys sharing her tech skills and knowledge within her community. She currently teaches a group of seniors monthly (Senior Geek Squad), where she developed the PACE model, to help improve, and/or develop seniors’ technology skills. Joselyn was awarded Best Adult Program from NCPLDA for her “Christmas Portraits Program.” She holds a BS in Communications from East Carolina University and currently working on her MLIS from University of North Carolina—Greensboro.

Location

Parking

Parking in the lots in front (to the west) of the McKimmon Center is free and usually plentiful. There are smaller parking lots on the sides and back of the Center that are reserved for University employees (see pink areas marked with a C below). Visitors are asked to park in designated visitor parking spaces (McKimmon Visitor North and McKimmon Visitor South) in the front of the building in order to avoid ticketing.

Theme: Librarians Outside Libraries

For 20 years, NC LIVE member libraries have come together to ensure that every resident of North Carolina -- no matter their community, income, or affiliation -- has equal access to quality resources to further their education or career; inspire their creativity; support their passions; and improve their quality of life. To accomplish such an ambitious goal, NC LIVE and its member libraries have sought out opportunities to partner, cooperate, and engage with outside entities to amplify the impact libraries and librarians have on the communities they serve.

Our 2018 theme, Librarians Outside Libraries:

Celebrates 20 years of librarians stepping outside their institutional walls to build programs and services that deliver unique value to their communities and, in the process, redefine the traditional role and reach of libraries; and

Anticipates the ways we can continue to increase our value by breaking down barriers, traversing boundaries, and expanding the definition of library “space” to include not only buildings, but networks, resources, technologies, expertise, and online communities.

Hotels

At NC LIVE, we work to keep conference expenditures low to boost accessibility for library folks from all around the state. Apart from offering free registration, NC LIVE has also negotiated discounted group rates at participating hotels for attendees. Below is a list of hotels close to the conference center with affordable and/or group-discounted rates.

Theme: The Future is Open

Libraries are embracing a future with fewer barriers to access; more inclusive spaces and communities; and collections and services that support a more diverse array of needs. The drive toward an open future is materializing in various efforts that span library departments and communities, including:

Lowering the cost of education through open textbooksRestructuring systems to meet the needs of more diverse resources and usersFostering partnerships to support underserved communitiesBroadening collections to include voices that mirror the populations we serveInvesting in emerging technologies, services, and spaces that foster creative and critical thinkingOur 2019 theme, The Future is Open, celebrates these and other ways libraries are democratizing access to information for a more inclusive, diverse, forward-thinking, and open world.